How precious those three fog-spoilt hours of the early morning would have been, could we have had them now! The minutes dragged on and still no orders came. Gradually, as the sun sank, the hideous din of firing around us died down and then ceased abruptly, as if some unseen hand had descended and shut off all the guns simultaneously. We limbered up and withdrew a little way up the hill, and unhooked again for the night. I cannot hope to describe the bitter disappointment of that moment. That we had been spectators all day was bad enough, that the horses had been waterless for thirty hours and that we ourselves were hungry, thirsty, and very weary, was worse, but that the pernicious fog should have prevented us from loosing off at any rate one round was the last straw. We found a small grain of comfort in the shape of a well at the bottom of the hill, to which, without removing their harness, we took the horses. After the usual wearisome process of dragging up the water in canvas buckets we found it to be muddy, yellow stuff, and the horses, thirsty though they were, would have none of it. Perhaps they were wiser than we knew.... From the western end of the valley, travelling at a tremendous pace, came a small cloud of dust making straight for us. It was a dispatch-rider, bringing word that the Turks were on the other side of the farther hill in great force and ordering us to clear out at once to avoid capture. It never struck us till afterwards that the fact of the water being undrinkable saved us. Had it not been that we had spent something like half an hour dragging it from the well and trying to persuade the horses to drink, the harness would have been removed and we should have been in our blankets and fast asleep. As it was, the Turks were in our position twenty minutes after our hurried departure. CHAPTER IX THE RETREAT Bewildered by this sudden turn of events, we hurriedly hooked the horses in again to guns and ammunition-waggons, slung on the personal equipment recently discarded--though our water-bottles were now, alas, empty--and quickly vacated the nullah. Where we were going to nobody save those in command knew; most of us were too weary to care. Our deadened senses were hardly capable of realising that the relieving Turks had somewhere broken through the cordon; we had to clear out and, in spite of what the firing had told us at sundown, we had failed to take Gaza. That much was now obvious; victorious troops do not as a rule retreat, especially at our present pace. Hence we had no option but to keep moving as fast as we could until we were ordered to stop.